Back in July of this year,
an article written by author Michael Gross about Trump’s modeling company was posted on the Daily Beast. It didn’t receive much fanfare, nor did these tweets-but lets take a look at them for a moment-
@harrysiegel
I've worked with Trump Models "Casting" we all knew of the trafficking
— Wade Turnbull (@Wade_Turnbull)
July 19, 2016
Asked to explain further, he stated the following:
@harrysiegel
For wealthy businessmen, Buying & selling fake contracts, Unfortunately many model agencies have the same business model
— Wade Turnbull (@Wade_Turnbull)
July 19, 2016
@harrysiegel
They'd ship in models, Eastern Euro's who had absolutely no chance of working in NYC. It becomes a debt slavery or fresh meat
— Wade Turnbull (@Wade_Turnbull)
July 19, 2016
These Tweets came from the account of Wade Turnbull. His remarks echo the sentiments of many who have worked with Trump Model Management. Turnbulls remarks are notable in particular because of their timing-They were made a full two months before the Mother Jones article outlining the immigration fraud, financial exploitation and generally deplorable working conditions at Trump’s agency were made public.
It should also be noted that Mr. Turnbull, judging by his Twitter feed, is no fan of Hillary Clinton. This is simply his impression, based on his experience working with this particular agency. And he is far from alone in his views.
About a month ago I came across a
Mother Jones article about Trump’s modeling agency and its treatment of a young, largely immigrant workforce. The story was, in a way the height of irony-here was a man who built an entire campaign on his hard-line stance against immigrants, and all the while his business was committing full-scale immigration fraud. But as I read on, I was struck by how much this all resembled the business model of sex trafficking-something I have researched and written about extensively.
I was not alone in my impressions-others who commented on the Mother Jones piece and the subsequent coverage made similar observations. MSNBC’s Chris Hayes
commented that Trump Models seemed to be borderline human trafficking, initially making the comment on Twitter and later on dedicating a
segment of his prime time show to exploring the topic. Seth Meyers, for his part, did a
segment on the MJ piece as well, comparing it to an episode of Law & Order SVU. While his commentary was cloaked in his usual sardonic humor, Seth’s disgust was evident as he wondered aloud if the prospect of Trump harboring sex slaves in his proverbial basement would be enough to make voters sour on his candidacy.
At the time this story broke, I assumed it was going to blow up. I assumed that follow up reporting would be done, and it would become the major story of the 2016 election. I thought it might even open up a long overdue dialogue about sex trafficking, and how our broken immigration and criminal justice systems enables its existence.
But that never happened.
To my astonishment the story disappeared into the ether of the 24/7 news cycle and seemed to be all but forgotten within a week, if that. Barbara Boxer initiated a senate inquiry, which I have been told is now underway. MJ did a short follow up, noting that Trump Models only response was to point out that the story was from “
many many years ago” (it actually wasn’t) Melania Trump sued a relatively unknown Canadian blogger and the Daily Mail over a related story, but otherwise disappeared from public view amid questions about her own strange and inconsistent account of her path to citizenship. And even as Trump ramped up his scathing rhetoric about undocumented immigrants, not one reporter bothered to challenge him on how he squared those public pronouncements with his business practices. Not one reporter asked him how much of his own purported fortune was made on the backs of undocumented immigrants, from his Polish demolition crews to his imported child models, and why that kind of thing was acceptable. The universe basically gave a collective shrug, and moved on.
And yet I couldn’t. And so I started researching, and writing what I thought would be a decent blog post, perhaps two, But the more I researched, the more I found, and the bigger the story became. I have conducted interviews with models who have worked with Trump’s agency, and those at rival agencies but were familiar with his practices and the industry generally.
This is a difficult story to write-it’s taken me hundreds of hours to slog through the research, and even longer to put it together in a coherent way. I’ve also been ham-stringed by the fact that most people who deal with Trump are not willing to speak on the record about their experience with him-especially the very people I had to talk to for this story, who are young and relatively powerless young women who signed iron clad non disclosure agreements and are afraid of the notoriously litigious Trump. I understand their hesitation-this is a dark subject, and it involves powerful people who no doubt have a vested interest in keeping a lot of this out of the public. Indeed, I have never been more afraid to hit “publish” in my life-my only comfort is knowing that everything I’ve written is based on factual information.
I came to a conclusion about the nature of Trumps activities, but I’m going to stop short of saying what that is and let the facts speak for themselves. Because this is a complex story, it is going to be done in several parts, and the installments are going to be long-especially this first one. In order to really understand the information I uncovered I had to learn about the history of the fashion and modeling industries in order to put it into context. I believe it will be helpful to others as well-it’s a different world, and most of us don’t ever navigate it. I believe that is a big part of why this hasn’t been picked up before.
(Note-For background information I relied primarily on 2 books- Model-The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women by Micheal Gross, and Bad And Beautiful: Inside the Dazzling and Deadly World of Supermodels by Ian Halperin. An earlier version of this story did not contain proper attribution, and I apologize for the oversight.)
So with apologies in advance for the length, and what might at times be some unpolished writing-please read all of this, and share it with others. There are many issues that require our attention, and many aspects of Trumps business dealings that need to be investigated- but this story is important, and it hasn’t ever really been told. I will do my best to tell it, with the hopes that other more skilled writers with bigger platforms and more resources can flesh it out further-preferably before November 8th.
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Originally Posted by Horn
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